WASHINGTON - Wholesale prices shot up 3.2 percent in November, the biggest jump in 34 years, propelled by a record rise in gasoline prices.The big inflation pickup in the Producer Price Index, which measures the costs of goods before they reach stores shelves, came after wholesale prices inched up by just 0.1 percent in October, the Labor Department reported Thursday.When volatile energy and food prices are removed, all other prices rose by 0.4 percent in November, after being flat the month before. The last time this price barometer registered a bigger increase was one year ago. The pickup in “core” prices suggested inflation may be seeping into a wider range of goods.The inflation figures were worse than economists were expecting. They were forecasting overall wholesale prices to go up by 1.5 percent, and core prices to increase 0.2 percent.Soaring energy prices were mostly to blame. (NOTE: No, its the Fed)They leaped by a record 14.1 percent in November.Gasoline prices posted an all-time high increase of 34.8 percent last month. Diesel fuel prices jumped 35.8 percent and home heating oil soared 31.5 percent.In another report, new applications filed last week for unemployment benefits dropped by 7,000 to 333,000, the lowest level since the middle of November. It was an encouraging sign that the employers aren’t resorting to large-scale layoffs as they cope with an economy whose growth has been slowed by housing and credit troubles.The figures were close to analysts’ forecasts for claims to dip to 335,000.Still, new-job creation has clearly lost speed this year as construction companies, factories, mortgage companies and others slash jobs because of the housing collapse and credit crunch.Rising inflation could complicate the Federal Reserve’s job of trying to keep the fragile economy expanding and inflation low.The Fed on Tuesday sliced a key interest rate to 4.25 percent, the third reduction this year, in an effort to prevent the country from falling into a recession. Rate reductions are a bracing tonic for weak economic growth, while rate increases are used to combat inflation.Oil prices, which had neared $100 a barrel, have moderated. But they are still high. High energy prices can slow economic activity and spread inflation if they cause the prices of lots of other goods and services to rise.“Elevated energy and commodity prices, among other factors, may put upward pressure on inflation,” the Fed warned on Tuesday. The Fed pledged to continue to “monitor inflation developments carefully.”Some bright spots in the inflation report: food costs were flat in November, after rising by a sharp 1 percent in October. And, costs for electronic computers dropped 2.4 percent.But prices for many other goods moved higher. Light motor truck prices rose 2.3 percent, the most in one year. Passenger car prices went up 0.6 percent and platinum and gold jewelry rose 2 percent.

"At the moment selling oil in dollars has been completely halted, in line with the policy of selling crude in non-dollar currencies," Nozari was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

"The dollar is an unreliable currency, considering its devaluation and the oil exporters' losses," he added.

The world's fourth-largest oil exporter, Iran has massively reduced its dependence on the dollar over the past year in the face of U.S. pressures on its financial system.

The U.S. has successfully encouraged major European and Asian banks to cut their dealings with Iran in a bid to make the Islamic republic give way on its controversial nuclear program.

Washington has also blacklisted major Iranian banks for alleged support of terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons, charges denied by Tehran.

Iran has reduced its assets in dollars held in foreign banks and urged OPEC to take collective action to price oil in other currencies such as the euro, instead of the U.S. currency which is used across the world at present.

The decline of the dollar, which has weakened considerably against the euro and other currencies in the past 12 months, has affected the revenues of OPEC members because most of them price and sell their oil exports in the U.S. currency.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Anheuser-Busch to increase the price of beerRising ingredient costs will continued to be passed along to consumersupdated 2:48 p.m. PT, Thurs., Nov. 29, 2007ST. LOUIS - Anheuser-Busch Cos. thinks consumers are more than willing to pay a little extra for beer.The nation’s biggest brewer will continue raising prices to counter a rise in the cost of ingredients, Chief Financial Officer W. Randolph Baker told a group of stock analysts at a conference in New York Thursday.Baker said consumers have accepted price increases on most products in 2007, sustaining profits for the maker of Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob.“Our object for the year was to find a way to cover (cost increases), and we did — but just barely,” Baker said. The cost of agricultural commodities like hops and barley has risen steeply, Baker said.Baker highlighted a bright spot for Anheuser-Busch — an apparent increase in consumer interest for domestic beers. Last year, beer industry shipment volume grew 2.1 percent, he said, the best annual performance since 1990. he said beer industry growth in 2007 has continued to exceed expectations, up 1.8 percent to date.“We see the resurgence in interest in beer. With the momentum there, it’s likely you’re going to have strong demand for beer,” Baker said.Anheuser-Busch will boost advertising spending next year to strengthen demand for its flagship brands, Baker said. Much of the spending will be made on national television ads, with spending increasing by double digits in 2008, he said.U.S. beer sales have lagged in recent years with the growing popularity of wine and cocktails. A report released Thursday by Goldman Sachs analysts Andrew Sawyer and Judy Hong said they’re concerned the trend will be difficult to reverse.“We are encouraged by the strategy to increase (Anheuser-Busch’s) focus behind the core brands, but it remains to be seen whether these efforts will lead to stronger volume growth anytime soon,” the report said.International beer sales have outpaced domestic sales, and Anheuser-Busch has been disappointed in its mainstay brand Bud Light, Baker said.In the third quarter this year, revenue for the U.S. beer segment rose 2 percent, while revenue from international markets jumped 8 percent.“The biggest priority is accelerating the growth of Bud Light, with a focus on improving our domestic beer profitability and performance,” Baker said.Anheuser-Busch shares fell 63 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $51.26 Thursday.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ben Stein, the economist, commentator, and one-time Nixon speechwriter, also well known for film and TV roles, says the cost of Medicare is already completely out of hand.

In fact, the future cost is beyond our ability to pay — period.“Medicare is such a crisis you can hardly imagine,” Stein said in a video commentary for Fortune magazine. “Actuarially, the U.S. is bankrupt right now.”He isn’t speaking theoretically. Stein says that the locked-in, required spending — figures not up for debate — simply overwhelm not only the potential income from taxes, but the actual value of the assets themselves.“The liabilities foreseeable up until the year 2050 discounted back to present value exceed the total wealth of the nation,” Stein said.“Every building, every warehouse, every K-Mart, every Wal-Mart, every Target, every Sears, every ship, every plane, every acre of wheat or corn, every oil well, put them all in one big bond, it would not equal the liabilities of Medicare,” he said.According to the American Academy of Actuaries, Medicare spending in 2006 hit 3.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). That figure will jump to 6.5 percent of GDP by 2030 and rise to 11.3 percent by 2080.Remember, too, that Medicare is not 100 percent coverage, so these estimates are not the total cost of health care, just the government’s liability.Add Social Security entitlements, and things at first blush don’t seem so bad. Social Security payments added on are projected to total 12.7 percent of GDP by 2030, rising to 17.6 percent in 2080, according to the actuaries.It can be easy to presume that the economy can potentially grow its way out of the entitlements mess — until you realize that GDP is the whole economy and not the federal budget.Consider, for a moment, that federal revenues average 18 percent of GDP. This means that in 2007 — this year — 40 percent of federal revenues already goes to entitlements.All things remaining equal, the Medicare and Social Security “bite” climbs to 80 percent of the budget by 2040.Entitlement spending consumes the entire federal budget by 2080, bankrupting the government. Education, security, defense, disaster aid, housing, environment, science, transportation — everything else — gone.“So it’s a real serious problem,” Stein said. “The solution to this problem is extremely difficult to figure out.”Means-testing — simply put, requiring wealthier Americans to pay more out of pocket rather than rely on Medicare — is probably inevitable, Stein said.That puts people who are doing the right thing and saving in a bind, since it adds an inestimable new cost to retirement: health care.“As a close friend of mine says, this is the joker in the deck: What are your medical costs going to be when you retire?” Stein said.“It could be much, much larger than you think. That means you have to save even more,” he said.Scarily enough, the U.S. personal savings rate fell below zero in 2005 and is now a couple of points below zero.Critics point out that such figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce mislead. For instance, the figure only counts after-tax savings. Your 401(k) and the value of your home are not added in.Don’t look for a silver lining there, though. Home values in the third quarter fell 4.5 percent, following a 3.3 percent decline in the second quarter, according to the latest S&P/Case Shiller home price index.And the massive number of adjustable-rate mortgages due to reset have not yet begun to kick in. That will add to the already large numbers of unsold homes on the market with no buyers to buy them — pressuring prices that much more.Meanwhile, retirement research from Boston College shows that nearly three-quarters of Americans who are eligible to participate in 401(k) plans do so. Nevertheless, less than one in 10 of them contribute the maximum amount allowed under the plan.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Dollar Drops to Record Low Against the Euro Amid Speculation of Another Rate Cut NEW YORK (AP) -- The dollar hit a new low against the euro in thin trading Friday as speculation continued that the American credit crisis will lead to another cut in interest rates in the U.S.

The 13-nation European currency spiked early to hit $1.4966, breaking the previous record of $1.4873, set the day before.

"Once again the message ... coming through is that with further rate cuts expected from the Fed, the dollar is struggling to find any serious supporters," said James Hughes, an analyst at CMC Markets.

In late afternoon trading, the euro had retreated to $1.4838, up from the $1.4833 it bought late in Europe the day before, but down from the $1.4848 it bought in New York late Wednesday.

The dollar fell to purchase as little as 107.56 Japanese yen, dropping below the 108-yen level for the first time since 2005. It recovered slightly to purchase 108.18 yen, down from 108.62 yen late in Europe on Thursday and 108.68 yen in American trading Wednesday.

The British pound, meanwhile, fell to $2.0612 from $2.0634 the day before in Europe and $2.0644 in New York Wednesday.

The Thanksgiving holiday weekend kept many players on the sidelines, while Japanese financial markets were closed Friday for the Labor Thanksgiving Day holiday.

The euro, the pound and other currencies have been climbing steadily against the dollar since August amid fears for the health of the U.S. economy, stoked by the subprime credit crisis.

The euro is on track to trade in a $1.50 to $1.60 range over the coming months, Norbert Walter, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, told Dow Jones Newswires on the fringes of the European Banking Congress.

In that range, it is overvalued by about 30 percent, he said.

Earlier in the day, Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Klaus Peter Mueller said he expected the euro to trade in the $1.50 to $1.60 range over the next 12 months.

The dollar has been further weakened by interest rate cuts, which can be used to jump-start an economy, but can also weaken a currency as investors transfer funds to countries where they can earn higher returns.

The Federal Reserve has already cut rates twice and speculation is growing that as the subprime fallout continues, it will be forced into another cut.

In other New York trading, the dollar rose against the Canadian currency. The Canadian dollar was worth $1.0108 Friday, down from $1.0160 late Thursday, according to Dow Jones' Interbank foreign-exchange rates, and from $1.0126 late Wednesday in New York.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The dollar's decline: from symbol of hegemony to shunned currency

By Andy McSmith Published: 17 November 2007

The decline of the dollar, symbol of US global hegemony for the best part of a century, may have become so entrenched that some experts now fear it is irreversible.

After months of huge and sustained turmoil on the money markets, lack of confidence in the world's totemic currency has become so widespread that an increasing number of international traders are transferring their wealth to stronger currencies such as the euro, which recently hit its highest level against the dollar.

"An American businessman over here who is given the choice would take anything but the dollar," David Buik of Cantor Index said yesterday. "I would want to be paid in yen, and if not yen then the euro or sterling."

Matthew Osborne, of Armstrong International, added: "The majority would say sterling. There are a few dealers in the City who may take the view that they'll take dollars now, while they're cheap, and hold on to them for 12 months.

"But the problem is so serious that there are people who in July or August might have been thinking, 'I'm paid in dollars, how annoying' for whom it's now a question of, 'Do you have a job; do you have a bonus?' "

The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US, which is fuelling the dollar unrest, has already brought down one British bank, Northern Rock, and has forced others to declare vast losses. Yesterday, just as it appeared that the dollar might have finally reached its floor, there was another warning that the sub-prime crisis is going to get worse. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, warned an international business summit in South Africa: "The sub-prime market, parts of it will get worse before it gets better." Huge numbers of US homeowners are still cushioned by introductory interest rates set when they took out loans in 2005 or 2006, he said. When these introductory offers run out, their interest payments will increase, setting off another wave of defaulting and repossessions. And the dollar is enduring its rockiest spell in recent memory.

Kenneth Froot, a Harvard university professor and former consultant to the US Federal Reserve, warned yesterday: "Part of the depreciation [of the dollar] is permanent. There is no doubt that the dollar must sink against periphery currencies to reflect their increase in competitiveness and productivity."

Professor Riordan Roett, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Bloomberg News: "There is a loss of confidence in the dollar and the US. It may only reflect the widespread dismay with the Bush administration, but it is obvious that the next administration, of either party, will have a steep uphill struggle." As well as reaching its lowest level against the euro, which has been trading at more than $1.47, the dollar has also fallen to its lowest level against the Canadian dollar since 1950, sterling since 1981, and the Swiss franc since 1995.

Its plight was made still worse by a jarring signal from China that it was switching to other currencies. Cheng Siwei, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, told a conference in Beijing: "We will favour stronger currencies over weaker ones, and will readjust accordingly."

The warning was reinforced by a Chinese central bank vice-director, Xu Jian, who said the dollar was "losing its status as the world currency".

China has stockpiled £700bn worth of foreign currency, and has only to decide to slow its accumulation of dollars to weaken the currency further. Last month, in a humiliating turn of events, the central bank in Iraq, four years after the United States invaded, stated that it wished to diversify reserves from a reliance on dollars.

Korea's central bank has urged shipbuilders to issue invoices in the local currency and take precautions against the weakened dollar, and three of the world's big oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than dollars. Iran insisted that Japan should make all its payments for oil in yen, rather than dollars.

Warren Buffet, who is reputedly the richest man in the world, was asked on the US network CNBC last month what he thought was the best currency in the world to own now. He answered: "Not the US dollar."

The Wall Street Journal ran an online poll asking people which currency, they would prefer to be paid in. The euro came top, ahead of sterling, with others such as the Canadian dollar, yen and Swiss franc trailing far behind. One respondent wrote: "Being an expat in Europe with a European employment contract, I am paid in euros, and happy to get paid in euros, and shop in the US, just as long as the cycle lasts through my retirement, so I can pick up pension in Europe and retire in the US."

The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates twice since September to revive the US economy, but the cuts – combined with the possibility that more were on the way – made the dollar less attractive to investors. Yesterday, it recovered slightly when one Federal Reserve banker, Randall Kroszner, dampened speculation about further interest rate cuts, saying that rates were low enough to get the economy through a "rough patch".

Problems with the greenback, combined with cheap air fares, have encouraged more Britons to go shopping across the Atlantic. British tourists spent £785m in New York last year, the city's marketing and tourism organisation said yesterday. There were 1,169,000 visitors to New York from the UK in 2006, with 54 per cent going for four to seven nights and 31 per cent staying for two to three nights. They spent an average of £112 a day. The average age of the UK visitor is 40.

Christopher Heywood, director of tourism PR for NYC & Company, said he expected the dollar crisis to attract yet more British shoppers. "The savvy traveller who's coming here for the shopping can really get a bargain. They're coming with one suitcase and leaving with two or three," he said.

"We have people coming over here even for weekend trips to shop for the famous brand names. People are coming for the department stores that everyone around the world knows, but also for the boutique stores out of the centre of Manhattan, anything from Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue to Bleecker Street in the West Village and SoHo."

Monday, November 12, 2007

If you inflate the currency but there is not adjustment or an insufficient adjustment for this inflation, this is the administrator of the currency stealing from you.

The commodities Price Index published each week clearly shows the theft going on and how radical it has been for the past two years, see:

Sept 27 2007http://www.economist.com/images/20070929/TAB3.gif

Sept 24 2005http://www.economist.com/images/20050924/TAB3.gif

CPI from 131 to 216.

Did your salary go up 66% in the last two years? No. You were just stolen from. The fed lowered interest rates and increased the money supple (They stopped publishing the M3 to hide this, so to see it, look here:http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html)

If you hold dollars or are paid in dollars then you were stolen from.

Now, if your salary does adjust upwards, you get hit with a higher tax bracket for the same of less purchasing power, meaning tax revenue goes up, but you purchasing power does not, or goes down. You were just stolen from again.

If your salary hasn't doubled since 2000. You lose.

Now, try to convert your money say to Swiss francs and hold them in a Swiss account and earn a lowly 2% interest. This terrorist government will try and ding you for income on the 2% interest! YOU JUST WANT TO KEEP THE VALUE OF YOUR MONEY STABLE! They have the nerve to track and tax your earnings in a foreign currency! They only reason I want to hide my wealth in Swiss Francs is to keep it from getting inflating to hell and they want to charge me for that?!?! Also, it is common for the USDOJ to seize and freeze accounts held by US citizens in foreign tax havens because you are "funding terrorists" and bull like that, they want to keep us bank slaves to the dollar.

This is INSANE, and the Boston Tea Party was over some measly less than 10% VAT on tea.

We are being taxed at about 50% [all said and done] (Sales, fed income, state income, tollbooths, interest, capital gains, etc), and now they want to keep in you dollars and dilute you position out from underneath you!

It is *so bad* right now as a worker paid in dollars its insane.

They say CPI is not core inflation, wrong, see the fed itself saying the two are supposed to be the same:

See here:"Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that this measure is no better than a moving average of the Consumer Price Index as a predictor of inflation."

The fed has been known to substitute steak for ground beef in the basket of calculations they use ( but reveal to no one about how core is actually calculated) to get the number they want.

You'll notice when reading Fed documents they are often vague, voodoo or self contradictory. They have to be. They are selling you bullshit. If you ran your household like them, you would be in default and homeless and garnished. If you ran your company like the Fed, you would be out of business. Its that simple. They are running our country's currency into the ground trying to keep Wall St. aloft, and trying to keep the housing and credit card crisis from imploding, but are making things far worse.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Ben Bernanke's moves to satisfy Wall St. have failed. Commodities prices are sky high. Salaried, hourly and fixed income employees everywhere are being SCREWED by inflation.

Try to exit dollars to Swiss francs or offshore your money, and you'll realize you might be labeled a terrorist and your money seized in an investigation. Also the banks and other colluders to exiting the US dollar position heavily load the transaction.

Realize that the Swiss Banks , even on numbered accounts, will let the US know of interest you get (This is new since 2002)! This was traditionally not the case, but know this, even if you legally change your post tax money into another currency and then get interest which is at or slightly below CPI-inflation, you can be thrown in jail for not reporting that "income." Even though this income offsets the fucking brutal inflation going on.

The real thief is this occupying force known as the US Federal Government. They undermine the states and the people, they arbitrarily ask for large taxes and they inflate the shit out of the money debasing everything you own! Then when the appraiser comes and values your house at some asinine inflated price, you pay skyrocketed property tax, and with inflation the salaries that did go up (not many did), you get subjected to AMT and other "rich guy" taxes!

They are literally STEALING your money by printing more of it. Ben Bernanke should be put to jail as a traitor. This guy is worse then Julius Rosenberg, and he was electrocuted. Ben Bernanke - the worst traitor against America alive today.

Sept 27 2007

http://www.economist.com/images/20070929/TAB3.gif

Sept 24 2005

http://www.economist.com/images/20050924/TAB3.gif

Your money purchasing power was halved in 2 years. Your salary didn't go up. Get it? You are not only being lied to, you are being fleeced and stolen from, and every paycheck over the last two years has been less money than the previous one.

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel. Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations. The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said. The discovery is "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years," Roy said. "This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere," Roy said. "Seeing it burn gives me the chills."Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding. The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery. "We will get our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Roy said. "The potential is huge."

Yahoo is on an anti-Ron-Paul binge, along with the rest of the terrorist media in the USA.

Yahoo's Terry Semel , who wants to do business with Nazis:The Wall Street Journal buries this tidbit in the middle of a blog post about Terry Semel's talk at the D Conference. The Yahoo CEO went all Vichy France when asked about Nazi collaboration:One attendee asked Mr. Semel if Yahoo would have cooperated with Nazi Germany the same way it has with China. His response: "Yahoo has a basic obligation not to have a point of view on basic content, and to present content ... and aggregate things and to allow people to make their own choices. I don't know how I would have felt then." "Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. You say 'Nazis,' I say 'business partners.'"Anyways, there is an inordiate amount of email I email myself back when sending out messages about Ron Paul that gets thrown into spam.Nazi-Yahoo is trying to censor Ron Paul.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Congressman Paul's consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, "Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers' ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are." Another colleague observed, "There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few."

The Fed, in a surprise announcement in Washington, lowered the so-called discount rate by 0.5 percentage point, to 5.75 percent. Policy makers dropped language indicating their bias toward fighting inflation, and instead highlighted a rising threat to economic growth.What this means is he is helping "investors" that do and create nothing churning nothing and screwing doctors, firefighters, regular Joe's, retirement accounts, savers and anyone with any financial sense and responsibility.

What this does is makes what you get paid every paycheck worth less. This makes your dollar buy less shit from China, Germany, wherever. What this does is makes all that money you saved for college and retirement worth LESS.

This man is a terrorist criminal and should have his leg cut off.

This is a bail out of BANKS who try and sell their junk debt to YOU and other suckers, these banks already own your lives, you pay them more in interest every month than principle, they sell your debt back to you via the GSEs and via selling the junk debt to retirement and pension funds.

They got us into this mess, yet they still get helped.

You see, Chrysler was a loan, S&L was a bailout, the Airlines was a bailout ... The relative cost of those in this situation is nothing.

Voters - its up to you know to write in to congress and have someone like Ron Paul appointed the head of a committee to stop this rampant insanity.

I also recommended the immediate forming of unions at workplaces that will only work gold or a constant gold equivalent in dollars. Dollars are a fake piece of fiat shit that clearly means nothing anymore, and the The Fed is a quasi-government entity that needs to be stopped and eliminated if it cant handle the simple task of keeping the money supply at a reasonable healthy level (+1%-1.5% inflation).

Saturday, August 04, 2007

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Massive dogs belonging to "Mission: Impossible" co-star Ving Rhames attacked and killed a live-in caretaker at the actor's Los Angeles home on Friday, police said. The caretaker, whose name was not released by authorities, was found dead on the front lawn of Rhames' gated home in an expensive Brentwood neighborhood, covered in dog bites, a Los Angeles police spokesman said.

Welcome to a world where defensively using or brandishing deadly force with a weapon will land you time in jail, but murdering people with your dogs will mostly likely result in no or light punishment.

I get sick of being attacked by rogue dogs (I've been attacked 3 times by rogue dogs and had to run away and stand on cars, etc, to escape mauling.) I had shot and killed the dogs that attacked me I would likely be in jail for the illegal discharging of a firearm.

This Ving Rhames idiot better be held to account for his hounds of hell, that god damn murderous idiot.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

If I were in charge, I would make a law that would prohibit the obfuscation of replacement parts for cars or anything for that matter. Part number obfuscation would result in the de-incorporation of a given company or possibly the firing squad shooting of that company's CEO.

What happens is this: You want a part, say, a rear light assembly. You look it up on various sites. They list mostly fake part numbers for non-genuine parts. You ask dealerships for the real part number and they basically laugh at you, they simply wont allow you to shop around with the real part number.

So finally you figure out what the real OEM part number is, some stores on tradmotion.com websites seem to keep them around, then you shop around.

You ask various local dealerships for a good price and they again laugh at you and treat you rudely. Fuck these people. Ill never buy a fucking car from that place - I hope its worth future business to fuck people on parts.

Then you put that part number in and search for an online store that sells that part:1) you get lies (the part is listed with the OEM PN, but is the non-genuine part)2) they charge hidden handling fees3) they markup for shipping and don't allow you to have the shipping billed to you4) they don't give you the OEM part, but a look-alike work-alike and a huge markup.5) you can't easily return the part for being defrauded

So, Toyota, and all other car makers, is it worth it to create a fraud industry of fake parts, and fraud rip off dealer-net tarnishing your name? Why doesn't the fucking car come with a parts list and a fucking repair manual asshole fuckers? In my world, I would have the CEO shot to death because he is ultimately responsible for this premeditated assault and defrauding of the public and require any car allowed to be sold that it be sold with a complete parts list and a repair manual. I don't believe if capital punishment for normal citizens, but generals, politicians and company executives, I think that capital punishment should be used often.

If I ever have executive powers, I will have CEOs shot for shit like this. I don't mind companies making money, but swindling and defrauding and poisoning the tax paying law abiding good-faith public will not be tolerated.

I don't know why people think about AMD much right now. If you check out spec.org benchmarks, the Opteron 2222 machines (3.0 GHZ) don't have a prayer at beating the 5160/X6800, in either FP or INT. Especially INT since almost everything you want to run fast is INT, the video cards do all the important vector and FP math.

I also only trust base measurements, because peaks are hacks at compiler options to make code a perfect instructions mix for the CPU arch, which almost never happens in real life.

I don't know why people suddenly think AMD is competitive, its not.

Its maximum wattage outputs are far higher, they cost more and have random sockets, now its 940-AM2 and F-1207, they have a huge family of sockets before now, which is stupid (and hurt AMD, especially getting rid of 940 and 939 and working against the Opteron 1xx sales).

If you put together a gaming rig which you aren't overclocking this year and its not Intel - I feel bad for you. I have an X6800 and a 8800GTX, and I've had them for 6 months. Nothing AMD/ATI has done even registers on my radar as a remote threat. This will not change throughout this year except for the new crop of 1333MHz FSB CPUs.

AMD scales better due to integrated memory controller. This scales better when you put more than 2 sockets in a box. Who cares, no one games with 4 socket motherboards.

Intel had Netburst, which put AMD ahead - way ahead. Now Intel has Woodcrest/Conroe, which could potentially get AMD to quit making silicon if they cant catch up.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

A cat was cloned. The DNA is identical. Yet the coat on the cats are not the same.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1820749.stm

Epigenetics. It seems that DNA can be controlled within the cell by attaching methyl or other suppressive functional groups onto the DNA. There are now cases which document identical twins where one gets cancer, the other doesn't.

Its interesting, along with anti-sense RNA and a better understanding of epigenetics, disease may soon be obsolete, if the governments and the large drug companies let this information exist. I strongly sense there will be a very vigorous campaign to keep these ultra cures, especially food-cures, out of accepted therapy by the internal medicine racket in the USA.

Why else would a known carcinogen like aspartame be allowed on the market? Or how about the article [ http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/11/healthscience/snvital.php ] that shows the while french fries made in animal lard are higher in fat, they have less toxins? Did you know that light oils used to fry things cause things like HNE to appear in your food?

You see people are usually individually incapable of having all the answers. Large groups of people seem to think they have more right answers than individuals, but they end up adding all the individual wrongness, so large groups of people can be very wrong.

Nature and the natural order was forged over eons of time and its very hard to out-think nature. People today think they solve problems, like making things low fat and then poisoning everyone with HNE.

The rabbit hole is very very deep. So deep that one should question everything.

"Think for yourself, question authority" -- Timothy Leary

Try to not take solace in being part of something bigger than yourself. Keep reminding yourself that large groups of people have been very wrong in the past, and always seek to audit what you or your groups are doing. Try to correct the wrongs or find faults in the group in order to boost credibility, don't cover things up to save the group or for the love of money.

This will kill us all if we don't learn to audit the veracity of things done to use via laws or policies of things like the government, the AMA, etc.

Now I'm not one to say that the ragheads are right and the US is evil. I think the US has a lot of law abiding tax paying citizens being turned into subjects by a terrorist government.

Definition, terrorism:

Terrorist \Ter"ror*ist\, n. [F. terroriste.] One who governs by terrorism or intimidation; specifically, an agent or partisan of said government.

We have the death penalty, we have an intimidating, constitution breaking, radically partisan (left and right wing) AUTHORITARIAN, autocratic federal and state systems that have gone way beyond the bounds laid out for them by both the federal and state constitutions.

So what we have here is a federal autocracy (both left and right wing politicians are autocrats today) that is effectively suspending the constitution, breaking its own root laws, taxing the public, prosecuting wars while our own treasury is broken and empty, inflating the money and selling out debt to foreign nationals such that the nation interests of the US are now leashed to other communist autocracies like the PRC China.

Banks also manipulate this government so that GSEs secure bad debt, we bail out the Savings and Loan banks if the default, and manipulate the government to hand out money at a very low rate. Banks lower the cost of money, manipulate the public by lobbying for tax deductions of interest (which leads to higher prices and more debt load) and basically own everything existence. The banks get a lot more tithing that the churches do.

Finally the energy companies which refuse to modernize and allow OPEC and other cartels and rackets to manipulate America. Because the Us refuses to move to nuclear, wind and tidal/wave motion and solar power, we are owned and operated by OPEC, and we must compete with China for a resource which should no longer be needed. We should be on the verge of the hydrogen economy, instead we still "burn wood" (coal) to produce energy. Its rather sad that the US today has more in common with 1800's industrial England that it does with "the world of tomorrow." burning coal for power, thats rich.

Take your country back, vote for libertarians or independents or independent thinkers like Ron Paul, vote for people who want to change things by dismantling the evil machines in the government, not by erecting more autocracies and authoritarian bureaucracies to fix the monster that is there.

Remember, this government is supposed to be our GUEST, not our ABSOLUTE RULER (which it is today). Remind them of this before its too late.

Everyone knows we are already at or very near where elections are fake.

Communist countries used to have elections, just like us. Without a constitution that means something, our lives could degrade into the second world very easily.

Anyone who buys CF bulbs is giving money to GE and others. This is like paying to get autism promoted. Do you all like autism? If so, run out and buy a stash of CF bulbs.

Some idiots say ROHS is not needed, and Mercury is ok - its disposed of properly! Yeah, right, thats why 1/160 people today get autism for "no reason." Could it be all the horrible nervous system destroying compounds and elements in the environment released by strip mining and unmitigated use of these CNS hazard materials in consumer products? Nah. Its just a natural rise. (Riiigt).

The word is that Pharox bulbs, for Oxxio customers overseas, use LED and less power than CF and don't contain any Murdercury. why dont you all write GE and ask why they prefer Murdercury CF over arrays of LEDs?

I wish someone could cut Avril Lavigne's leg off. Either. This would probably stop her from doing her garbage videos and quit making her horrible music with horrible lyrics with her horrible wardrobe and punch-me-in-the-face makeup. Someone shooting her would lead to her becoming a music martyr.

This whole weak dollar is going to save the economy is laughable. The fed has two choices, inflate the dollar to keep the illusion of affordability for those who are about to go under, and allow the government and the folks who have way too much debt (no one should have any debt at all, maybe a house payment and that is it, no seconds or HELOCs) to try and pay the loan off with inflated dollars.

But this comes a high price.

1) If you make money, and your salary isn't being adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar you get at work is simply going down all the time.

2) For those who save, or have positions indexed in dollars (stocks, etc), you lose.

So the way you trivialize debt is to trivialize all money.

Now since the world is more global, we have unnaturally cheap PRC Chinese goods keeping us afloat, but hard things like copper, gold, aluminum, steel, gas, food, etc, are all getting drastically more expensive while your salary stays the same.

If the PRC Chinese overheat and their prices start to rise from production cuts, or our M3 money supply shrinks due to housing and other paper-wealth that is leveraged, then we have a bad situation.

The fed needs to prevent deflation and prevent hyper inflation at the same time. Too much inflation and oil gets sold in Euros, not dollars. Lots of deflation mean lots of defaulting on loans.

This is what happens when people are allowed to screw up. The people learned this from Amtrak, American Airlines, the Savings and Loan industry, the GSEs and Chrysler.

Also, this weaker dollars leads to exports stuff only washes if you make a lot of stuff people want, and you get most of your raw materials to make things in your own country.

The USA only makes giant machines and Boeing aircraft, the rest of the crap the US sell is lawyer services, tax services and software (which is being commodities). If the crap hits the fan, the fan, the US doesn't make much that others need to survive. The US can be written off more easily that it thinks.

Also, if you are actually making electronics or high tech stuff here, world class hardware that cant be CMed out to Taiwan, Korea or PRC, then you pay your CMs more due to the weak dollar but you sell your product in dollars, which others can buy cheaply due to its weakness. Pay more for the raw materials due to a bad exchange rate, and "charge less" due to a bad exchange rate. Not good.

Its simple. If the dollar inflates 2x, and you 2x your sales without raising prices, you've done nothing. And if your buying raw materials from external countries, this complicates this even further.

People: focusing on fundamentals and making money and not "growing " is more important. This is how Warren Buffet got rich, and how Microsoft has 40 Billion in cash. While people paid way too much in the past for .coms for a chance at growth, the real investors try and focus on making money, making cash, increasing principal.

All you debt-jerks are really screwing it up for us realists who believe in making money not getting rich quick or "having your money work for you."

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

All I have to say is SuSE 10.2 isn't very good. I regularly use RHEL/CENTOS 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, and installation, updates and package management is a breeze.

Yast/Yast2 takes forever to do things, and it attempts to be a system-wide control panel, not a package manager.

I installed yum on 10.2 and never needed Yast2 since, but damn this is annoying.

Now for the real kicker. Yast2 allowed the selection of kernel-bigsmp on an x86_64 install, and it gleefully installed that 32-bit/IA32 kernel and wiped out the old default kernel! What the fuck? No I have to go and grab 9 packages or so (who the fuck thinks of breaking the kernel, kernel headers, modules, kernels and sources apart like this?) and manually install them while booted into Knoppix and manually edit grub and then fix up the package issues when I get this piece of shit to boot again.

A note to Novell / SuSE: Fix your fucking package manager so it doesn’t install shit that fucks the whole system up. Thanks.

Right now, I primarily use FreeBSD, Gentoo and Redhat/Centos, with a majority of my "supported/production" work being in Centos. I always hated my sidetracks into Mandrake/WomanDrake, Mandriva/Mandrivel and SuSE/OpenSuSE. This stuff has been a consistent timesink while offering nothing.

Also, AppArmor, this stuff is shit. Yes, I know SELinux is a huge pain in the ass and leads to people just going:

selinux=0 capability=0 capability.disable=1

And this is wrong, but AppArmor. This stuff is the way lazy admins will go and it is crap, its not really a work-alike to SELinux, and it can be easily bypassed.

Anyway, thanks Novell / (more like non-novel) for a shit product no one needs.

Note to the world, if you see:

request_module runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c or something similar

Then it is most likely a 32 bit kernel on a 64 bit system.

Oh, I like how RPM makes it hard to find arch once the packages are installed. That’s nice. (yum front ends this nicely). rpm -qa shows package names with no arch info. Stupid. You can use RPM on Knoppix by saying : rpm -dbpath to your system you are trying to rescue. Kind of useful.

Also, making usb bootables (key flash pen jump Thumb-Drive, why assholes call these things 90 different names is beyond me) and installing over the network with SuSE is a bigger pain in the ass, and the damn SuSE keeps asking for CDs and DVDs from time to time which is asinine.

Oh, and SuSE, the boot.local sucks, there is no easy place to put after everything is done for the runlevel, run this, so I had to make a file for rc.d and do all this fancy shit to make it run last and activate it through chkconfig. What a fucking pain in the ass.

Also, SuSE shows these fucking gay non-LANG=C characters all over the place. I wish this internationalization shit was totally fucking off and gone by default. I remember Solaris asks on version 8 or 9, do you want normal C ASCII text, or all this fucking shit that came after it and fucked everything up? Anyways, between i18n, ncurses, terminal types, and /etc/sysconfig/fonts-config , /etc/sysconfig/console, and stupid non-working frame buffer modes (I wish vga=extended was the default for all these distros) which scroll slow as ass, the world of plain Using plain English in *nix has gotten WORSE, not better and the C language has English syntax, what the fuck?

Also, what the fuck is with distros burying the sources and being cute with this shit? Cant we just get the /usr/src/linux directory symlinked to the actual pile of shit that is the kernel, as in, go into the kernel directory and if you ran make install, it would overwrite exactly all the files installed via the package. Then for the 40 kernels that exist , you can just move the symlink to the running kernel and all these stupid nvidia, cisco vpn and 3rd party drivers would find all the shit they needed without this constant shit. On SuSE I had to make oldconfig for the kernel to be useful.

make oldconfig , make prepare, make, make modules (vestigal in 2.6)

Oh, and the final thing. Asshole linux repackagers, listen up. Stop modularizing the shit out of BASIC stuff like sata and PATA drivers. What the FUCK are you thinking, when the shit hits the fan, if the kernel has the storage modules inside of it, rather than a module, then you actually not have to get Knoppix to fix shit. Assholes. I know the whole entire gigantic library of drivers would be a pain, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD generic kernels boot any random shit, but linux vendor packaged kernels have this fucking fetish for initrd/piles of modules that is just getting fucking old. Give me a real reason why to try and take shit out of the "base" kernel and shovel it into modules? The compatibility problems by having two drivers that may not like each other in the kernel together is FAR outweighed by the pain in the ass these initrds are to make if you need to get into the system real bad.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

#1 - she has an annoying voice.#2 - she "strikes a pose" as if she is some sort of supermodel every 30 seconds.#3 - Americans don't care about trophy wives of British soccer athletes.#4 - her bumpers piss me off when I'm watching a real show like Scrubs.#5 - I wouldn't ever watch the show based on the bumpers, but the bumpers make her out to be a shallow idiot and she seems like annoying, stupid kept woman I have no interest seeing on TV.

Ed and Elaine Brown are true American patriots. They prove that even if you buy your house and own it 100%, the government still wants you to pay up or they will illegally deprive your of your property.

This illegal government is growing in size and strength. They are destroying what made America great, the freedom, the independence, the defiant come back American patriot, reduce to a 9-5 drone that gives half his pay to destroy foreign lands via the military industrial complex, then those lands get rebuilt by the military industrial complex, and then the military industrial complex relocated to Qatar to avoid paying any taxes, half my pay not to rebuilding New Orleans but to destroy and rebuild Iraq as we funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex in Iraq.

And these puke Federales actually have the gumption, the fucking gall to attempt to criminalize these people.

Can't America be a place where you leave people who want to be left alone the fuck alone?

All you pathetic gun grabbing communists and autocratic authoritarians that believe in central governments take a whiff of the shit in the air, the Iraq shit, the Putin/Ahmadinejad/Kim Jong/Musharraf shit, the Castro shit, the PRC China shit. Central governments murder people, reduce freedom and subjugate people to their will.

America has become what it was designed to be a safe haven from. This crap with the rule of law is being confused with the rule of banks, the rule or a certain select few over the many, the rule or big business and the military industrial complex over the waning middle class. And these bastards defied the constitution by making our money into shit, by taking it off the gold standard so they can steal your money even if you save it by inflation!

The people have been robbed and fucked by the US government so much they are used to it now, and heroes like Ed Brown come of ass "radical" or even "terrorists."

Friday, July 20, 2007

"If Islam's sole interest is the welfare of mankind, then Islam is the strongest advocate of human rights anywhere on Earth." -Mos Def

Women are murdered for adultery is common in Islamic Sharia. Gays are murdered in Sharia. Women are routinely executed in Saudi Arabia for having affairs initiated by powerful men who then "dispose" of them. Clitorises the world over are chopped off of women in the name of Islam. Islam has a fairly deserved bad reputation, Mos, and your views on this religion disgust me.

All the Islamic governments, from Uzbekistan to Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Iran, Malaysia, Sudan - all of them with the exception of Turkey and maybe Egypt a decade or so ago are murderous bloodthirsty and despicable and routinely violate human rights worse than any other nation.

How many people must be stoned to death in the name of Allah for you to "recognize." How many clitorises chopped off? How many gay man hung? How many concubines of sick murderous Saudi men must be killed off in the name of Islam for you to "recognize?"

You want Islam to be a force of God, then work to stop murder by Islamists and Islamofascists.

Shahed, leader of a militant Islamic group, al-Muhajiroun. Shahed is not un-Islamic. We read in the sacred hadiths, "Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said, 'I have been commanded (by Allah) to fight people until they testify that there is no true god except Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform Salat and pay Zakat.'"

The PRC Chinese government has murdered countless people:"DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER"http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTMhttp://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIFhttp://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Brigitte Biver called 311 about 9 p.m. on July 4 to report illegal fireworks so deafening that they sounded like they were exploding right over her Norwood Park home.

When Biver was transferred to Chicago's 911 emergency center, she thought she would get an even quicker response. Instead, all she got was laughter -- hysterical laughter.

"I have never heard anything like that in my life. This person was laughing uncontrollably. When she picked up the phone, she burst into laughter. She probably had been laughing for a while. I kept on saying, 'Hello. Hello.' But she couldn't talk. She never stopped laughing," said Biver, 58.

'She hung up on me' "I finally said, 'I'd like to report some heavy fireworks activity.' She was still laughing as she asked where I was located. I said Norwood Park. Still laughing, she asked where in Norwood Park. Then, she said, 'Ma'am, you're gonna have to call back.' I said, 'Can I have your name please.' But she hung up on me."

Biver was furious. But she regained her composure long enough to dial 911 again, never mentioning the previous call.

This bitch. Inflation is rising to record levels. There is a trade defect. There are people dying every day in an expensive war. Potential housing collapse / ARMageddon seems imminent. The dollar is getting murdered against the Euro, commodities and the British Pound.

And a few folks blow off some traditional steam on the 4th, and this fucking cow things that this is important for the RAPE-MURDER-INFERNO emergency service line?

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Now that David Chase has completely ruined his series (ever noticed how all the good mob movies ended with a rather satisfying ending?), its not time to cancel HBO. Since 6 Feet, Deadwood and Sopranos are all gone, why have this piece of crap around?

Why didn't HBO , as OMC said it in "How Bizarre," 'Buy the Rights.' They didn't need Chase anymore. Chase is an idea guy, and not a super great one at that, get this, a miniseries featuring plot-lines ripped from tens of great mob movies. Its fun to watch. Who would have thought?

Anyways, Chase directed only the first and last episodes. It shows. The last episode was inferior.

Also, it tended to be that things that he wrote and co-wrote were below the batting average of the shows.

He left curb stomp Coco out there, the Russian guy in the woods, Silvio in a coma, The FBI guy saying "we'll win this yet" without explanation, Uncle Junior demented, Paulie with unresolved issues with Tony, you name it, this scumbag Chase (David DeCaesare, lets call this prick by his name, David DeCaesare) left everything hanging.

The show ended for my when they killed big pussy anyways.

I wish someone would capture David DeCaesare-Chase, and cut his right leg off above the knee. And while cutting it off laugh and spit in his face. Tell him he didn't need that right leg like everyone didn't need a proper Sopranos ending. Thats what I wish would happen. He may have money and hubris, but he now would have to limp like the bitch gimp he is, and his little piles of money couldn't change that.

Anyhow, I think HBO should hijack the rights and hire even bigger and better writers to finish this off with style. One of the greatest movies of all time, Godfather, ended properly, this is just a piss poor excuse at being artsy, but in reality its a giant F.U. to the fan base.

Everyone, get the stones to get up and cancel HBO. It just went from Home Box Office to seriously Heavy Body Odor.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

In the scrubs episode "My New God", (98th episode), the music playing during the evil stare is Koyaanisqatsi, by minimalist composer Philip Glass, who was himself lampooned in the south park episode "A South Park Christmas." The Janitor rules.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

The New York federal reserve said that using "core inflation" is not good inflation metric, it is more telling to use a moving average of CPI.

Which means that all those times "healthy" inflation numbers were reported the numbers were seen as good simply because gas and food were not used in the calculation of those inflation numbers.

Reading 'The Economist' paints another ugly picture for inflation: 100 USD in the year 2000 is equivalent to 204 USD today. Did your salary adjust (double) to accommodate this horrific inflation?

In fact, inflation is such a problem and is latent on everyone's mind it was satirized in a cartoon in the Economist:

A bull with horns and a t-shirt that says "Markets" runs full speed towards a soccer ball. He punts the ball at full speed and full strength. The ball flies away. The bull flexes his muscles after his stratospheric punt. A HUGE soccer ball comes back and blows the bull away. Another bull with bandages and bruises comes into the picture with the caption "Inflation!" That "record" down when normalized against commodities, gold, industrials, steel, anything, isn’t so "record" high. It’s a new low being sold as a high - but the invisible hand knows.

With inflation, core or "All Items," factored in, the current "record" markets are just getting back to where they were five years ago, and if those records are adjusted for inflation… - Things aren’t doing to well - certainly not a record.

The Fed has been printing money, expanding the money supply for the last 6 years such that a dollar today is worth half as much as a dollar in 2000. See:

Has your salary nearly doubled since 2000? Looks like the money supply was expanded (M0 + M1 + M2 + M3 ), prices adjusted exactly to the increased money supply, yet a dollar is just as hard to earn. Jobless claims are underreported, and those who are not educated and in demand or not yet commoditized by inexpensive overseas or immigrant labor aren’t doing too well as far as being able to maintain a standard of living that the US should be capable of supporting.

The Fed stopped publishing the M3. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply . This is most likely a strategy to hide the vast increase in money supply.

The calculations for inflation that are often quoted is the 'core inflation,' which excludes GAS and FOOD. Yet this has been said by the NY Fed: "Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that this measure is no better than a moving average of the Consumer Price Index as a predictor of inflation."

CPI and the "Core Inflation" are more or less the same thing. Inflation is being underreported. The prices for things not made in China / PRC are rising sharply.

This is Stagflation. We better hope for the dollar to come back to being money and hope interest rates go up. For all those with big loans they need to tie, those who foolishly borrowed greedily stole money from the children's future for transient low quality items and a McMansion - a liability for the owner in the form of taxes, insurance and paying interest, and a boon for the banks and local governments.

Low interest rates and "cheap money" help buy things you cant afford and may help stimulate non-US / overseas / emerging market sales, but salaries are still paid in USD, so rooting against the dollar destroys what is saved, destroys the value of profits and the buying power of the dollars for both businesses and employees.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

I have Vista on a machine. Exchange 2003 OWA doesn't work properly with Vista. Microsoft, the pack of assholes, requires a patch to the exchange server OWA to make OWA work on Vista RTM. No one should have to patch the server simply to fix a broken fucked up client like IE7.

Anyways.

Firefox works great. Its not the premium client - but hey, at least I donut have to ask IT to risk breaking a working exchange server simply to make Vista work.

So now the main reason for tolerating exchange, OWA (outlook web access), looks like shit because I have to use Firefox to actually be able to reply to things - and Microsoft premium OWA requires fucktive activex, so that means opera and firefox have to look like shit.

Now here is the kicker.

You know how Firefox is super-awesome and saves half filled out forms and post boxes for you so in case of an accidental forward/backward or crash, its all there for you when you get back? Well IE7 doesn't do that shit, and somehow, OWA fucks Firefox from being able to work its magic in the reply box.

So I lost about 3-4 minutes work on a longer email reply.

All I have to say to Microsoft - give me a break. Microsoft can pull off vista, have a huge OS that works ok, a huge API, you name it. But they cant manage to keep libraries straight (WinSXS anyone? What a fuck-up), the 64 bit emulation sucks (WOW64 is a dirty, lame hack and Windows in 64 bit mode sucks, stuff like palm desktop doesnt even work right over USB), they manage to have an IE 7 that sucks worse than FireFox in every way but startup time (adblockplus - yes , stumbled upon, yes). Not even IE7Pro can help to unfuck how bad IE7 is, the Interix environment (Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications), get this, ar was fucked up because they named is ar64 or something, and the userland on Interix out of the box sucks hard - so hard, its hard to bootstrap the GNU toolchains - and what the fuck is with .NET frameworks. Why not just do the $JAVA_HOME thing and be done with it? Why is this stuff so melted and glued and stapled into the OS? Here is a directory with the VM and some classes and shit. Use if you want to.

This is all to say that the core, the David Cutler / DEC/VMS rip off part works great. The frosting sucks shit. Microsoft needs to pay more attention to not getting fucked by stupid shit. The kernel works great, now stop making shit flavored frosting and everything will be grand.

I wish microsoft had a super thin no login require portal to post stuff like this so they could improve this stuff. If I was gates/ballmer/whoever, I light a big fire under the product managers for transgressions like this - letting open-source stuff drastically out-pace Microsoft on usability.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

I have a D975XBX2 Intel MB. It has a Marvell 88SE61xx Controller. This is a criminal chipset and is the worst SATA controller ever made with the worst drivers and if I was Pinochet for a day, I would throw the CEO of this company out of a C-130 at 20,000ft for all the hard drives and data loss this chipset causes.

This chipset is criminal.

Why dont Asus, Intel, etc, why dont they just solder 3ware or LSI or any decent non-FAKE-RAID (FRAID) chips on these motherboards? Why would a program manager ever choose an asic that has fake raid, is crap, has crap drivers and sucks?

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Vista has quite a large number of log files. Sometimes its nice for troubleshooting to wipe out all the logs and create a problem to see that problems manifestations in the logs. The following in a batch file will do this.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Hey, Oprah, there are black people in Louisiana that need your help never mind Africa.

Nelson Mandela != God, Messiah, etc. Just wanted to clear that up. He poops like a man, and has , in conjunction with his wife, done some very naughty things.

Let me tell you how to fix the world. Start with yourself, make sure you don't drink too much, do hard drugs, exercise a bit, and keep yourself financially solvent, obey laws, work and self actualize if possible. Then be sure your family members you are responsible for do the same, then work on extended family, then work on friends, then work on your town/county/state, THEN work on your country, THEN, maybe then, when all the other problems are solved, THEN think about Africa. If everyone took care of their own damn house, there wouldn't be any problems in the world.

Something awful said it best:Oprah Winfrey Does Care About Black People

I have never liked Oprah Winfrey. There's something about her that sets me wrong in the same way as a flowing curlicue wig on a baby or a man with no teeth seen from a distance biting into an apple. This unease I feel at the sight or sound of Miss Winfrey goes well beyond my innate distrust of her people and the crafty indolence to which her race is genetically predisposed. There is an ill-defined something at her core that is amiss.

Over the years she has transformed herself several times over. She has gone from corpulent maven of baby mama drama, to over enthusiastic motivational den mother, to her current incarnation as cooing self-righteous philanthropist. This latest and greatest Oprah, already bound for media sainthood, is the one which concerns me the most.

After having already saved the written word, Oprah announced the grand opening of her theme-park-cum-elite-academy for girls in South Africa. Located somewhere near a giant pit full of people dying of AIDS, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy intends to "nurture, educate and turn gifted South African girls from impoverished backgrounds into the country's future leaders". Winfrey believes this can best be achieved by spending 40 million dollars building a sprawling state-of-the-art campus for a very small number of girls.

Many critics wondered aloud and possibly into microphones why Winfrey had chosen to spend all of her money educating girls in Africa when there are plenty of perfectly adequate girls in the United States.

"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there," [Oprah Winfrey] says. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

"Girls excited about their new opportunity. Not pictured: 2,848 girls still living in poverty."

In response to their requests for school uniforms, Oprah built a campus that includes a beauty salon, yoga studio, state-of-the-art theater, stately dorm rooms that put most American university dorms to shame, wireless internet and a giant gold statue of her with those creepy eyes that follow students wherever they go. Yes, girls who lived inside refrigerator boxes next to a pile of dirty diapers are finally able to activate their chakras and download videos of white people dancing next to moving cars. It's sort of like finding one of those Japanese guys who spent the last 60 years on an Island in the Pacific thinking World War II was still going on and then flying him immediately to California to tape an episode of Jeopardy.

Oprah received over 3,000 applications for her Leadership Academy and she accepted the 152 girls with the most tragic or heartwarming stories. They're mostly AIDS babies, maybe a few kids raised by hyenas, one with two heads and a heart of gold, some adorable puppies that survived cross-country adventures with their kitten friends, that sort of thing.

The 2,848 kids who just weren't quite feeble and heroic enough to pass muster were shown the door. No school uniform, no iPod, just a gift tote with some bath salts and a candle that smells like apple pie.

Oprah's Leadership Academy opened its doors on January 2nd of the new year. Being a Harpo Production, the Academy could not have a low-key opening. It received a full-scale media blitz, press releases by the dozen and a plush party featuring celebrities who no doubt care deeply about creating the next generation of leaders in Africa.

Local businessman Tokyo Sexwale was also present and Nelson Mandela was expected to attend although he had not yet arrived by midday.

In addition to a businessman with the most awesome name ever in the history of all time, the party included a lavish spread of cocktails, delicacies and a cigar bar. The students who were rejected by the Academy were allowed to dig through the trashcans for crusts of bread and Tina Turner's used sanitary napkins. Some time around 9 PM Nelson Mandela shit in his pants and Oprah read a poem by Maya Angelou about a rock on fire rolling down a mountain being the black struggle.

The touchingly misguided, or misguidedly touching, saga of Oprah's misguided school for impoverished African girls reminds me most of all of a scene from one of my favorite movies.

Near the end of Steven Spielberg's cinematic thrill-ride Schindler's List there is a scene in which Oskar Schindler, a true Nazi hero, has shepherded his ragtag band of Jewish misfits all the way to an armaments factory in the middle of nowhere.

Evil Russians are coming to kill the last of the Nazis and so he has to escape in the middle of the night. The Jews - who are so grateful for his guidance that they have made a ring out of the gold elderly Jews secrete from their gums - stand around thanking Schindler and wishing him well as he and his wife prepare to flee into the night.

After saying a tearful goodbye, Schindler realizes that had he curbed his own life of excess he might have been able to save more Jewish people. He points to a car and a ring with a Swastika and cries "this is worth like 500 Jews", or something to that effect.

The Jews quiet him down and send him on his way, but the moral of the scene is clear and is one Oprah should ponder before embarking on her next epic of philanthropy: even when you do good, you can do more good if you try harder. Or something along those lines.